He paused and took a breath and said, “Also, I’m clumsy except on the dance floor; I can do a mean shag. And I’m cranky and bone-lazy and absentminded and I play a good blues guitar and have one of the best collections of blues tapes in the Western world, and I read constantly and unselectively and take in stray animals and play a little tennis every now and then but no golf, and I’m a terrific cook, and I am prone to have a snort more often than not. I have no significant other, but I do, as we say in the South, entertain friends once in a while. I am clean, disloyal, not at all brave, and trustworthy to a limited degree. You, for instance, could trust me with your life, but not many other Southerners can, or do. They’re right not to. I am not, as has been pointed out to me on many occasions by my family and in-laws, a responsible provider. There. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to ask me yourself.”
“Wow,” I said, grinning a little ruefully.
“Didn’t I tell you never to ask a hermit a question?”
“Do you really think of yourself like that? As a hermit?”
He frowned slightly, and the brown forehead furrowed under the flag of black hair that fell over it.
“I think of myself as someone who has to live like this,” he said slowly. “Or maybe it’s that I have to live up there. I’m not quite the same person even down here in town. I’m certainly not the same one back there in the Delta. And it’s that mountain person I need to be, not those others. So…I guess in a way I am a hermit. I don’t know what else you’d call it, and in any case it doesn’t matter.”
“I can sort of see what you mean,” I said. “About not being the same up there. There’s…something…isn’t there?”
“Yeah. I thought you’d see. You’re different up there, too. I’d bet the farm on that. Not the same person as you are back home. It doesn’t mean you’re better or worse, just different. Somebody else. You don’t need or want the same things as that other person.”
I did not reply. How could one person suddenly become two? I hated the thought, and said as much.
“God, how could you not be two people?” he said. “You can be fifty people, or a hundred, if you need to. Lots of people are, but they never know it. They try to bring the person they were in one place to another completely different one, and nothing fits, and they’re restless and unhappy, and likely to be that way all their lives. You’re lucky you felt the difference. You’re at least able to realize that there is one. Whether or not you can be who you need to be up here, is another matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: If you try to force the person you were back there to live up there in those woods for long, you’ll end up hating them and yourself, too. If I went back home I’d turn back into the person that was of that place, and nothing about it would work. Poor Annabelle, it was that person she married. But that person couldn’t stay in the Delta or in his own skin. Just could not. Up there, I’m finally me—but she hates this me. I can’t go back there and she couldn’t come out here with me. I’m making a real hash of this. I think I mean that you need to go with who you are wherever and whenever you find yourself. That’s what I mean by carpe diem. I think.”
“Carpe diem…”
“Yeah. Live like you need to wherever you are, every day. How could you be unhappy then?”
“How could you be with anybody else, living that way?” I said in real distress, wanting to understand.
He shrugged.
“Maybe you can’t. Maybe people like that aren’t meant to live with anybody else. It turned out that I couldn’t. Maybe I could with somebody who was…of my place. But so far, nobody else has been—”
“It sounds like Joseph Campbell,” I said. “You know, follow your bliss? I never really liked that idea. It seems so self-obsessed. But maybe it’s the only honest way to live—”
“Yeah, well, it’s why I don’t talk about this to people,” he said. “It does sound like New Age shit, and it’s as self-absorbed as hell.”
We were both silent for a while. I thought about what he had said. It would not fall into a neat pattern.
In a moment he said, in a different voice, “I’m glad it wasn’t you who’s Pringle’s lady. At first I thought it was.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” I said.
He stared at me.
“Are you kidding? You’re so pretty. You must know you are; I thought when I saw you, ‘Damn, it’s got to be her, and she’s such a classy woman, so much better than his usual ones.’ When your sister said it was her I almost cheered.”
I felt the hot color run up my neck and into my face.
“You must be kidding,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t. I hate that kind of stuff—”
“I’m not kidding,” he said, and I saw that he was not.
“But…Lord, you saw Laura. I mean, she’s a movie star; she’s always been the beauty, a real one. People stop her on the street and in malls—”
“And here you are, a tall, skinny lady with freckles and a mop of curly hair like Brillo and a smile that could smelt ore. Who on earth would find you pretty? Beautiful? Only about a million people like me, Miz Merritt Fowler. Don’t sell yourself short. You are one terrific-looking woman, and, I think, a nice one, too. So what’s eating you? Your daughter? Your airhead little sister? You got troubles back home? Fighting with your husband, are you?”
“No,” I said coldly. “I am not. Why did you think I was?”
“Heard you on the phone.”
“I don’t remember saying anything that sounded even remotely like I was fighting with my husband. I did not even speak with my husband. That was his secretary—”
“Look, babe, I know the tone. It’s one thing I do know, the tone of a woman’s hurt and anger. I’ll shut up about it; it’s none of my business, of course. But I do know the tone.”
Abruptly the cold anger left me. I looked down at my hands. They were clasped whitely on my empty glass.
“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s more of a misunderstanding. They happen in all marriages. I’ll get things straightened out when I get home.”
“You’ll get,” T.C. said. “You’ll do. You’ll fix. Who does all those things for you?”
Incredibly, I began to cry. I sat in the waning sun and cried silently and for a while I could not stop. He wet a napkin in his water glass and mopped my face with it, and in a little while the ridiculous tears slowed and stopped, and I looked blearily up at him. He looked back mildly concerned, but mainly serene and focused and very interested.
“Tell me,” he said, and I did. I sat there, alternately sniffling and hiccuping and laughing, and I told him all of it. It seemed to take a very long time. I left out little, from my mother’s death up to the present, except that I did not mention the beautiful, selfless, saintly black UN doctor who was perhaps moving even now by Pom’s side through places where he and I once went as a unit. Somehow I could not manage that. To name it is to make it real, to make it yours.
When I finished, I said, “Well, that’s it. The world according to Merritt Fowler. I’m sorry I cried. Hearing it out loud, it all sounds pretty trivial. I’ve had a charmed life, really.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Just like I had. Listen, Merritt, don’t let all that stuff ruin this for you. This right now, that up there…it’s too good, too special to spoil. Leave that woman back home. Be here now; be all the way here. Let’s see who you turn out to be up there. Let me show you the woods.”
I was suddenly embarrassed and tentative. We had shown each other too much, talked too much. It was too soon.
“Show me the way to go home, instead,” I said lightly. “I’m asleep in this chair. If I don’t get out of here I’ll be comatose.”
He laughed and accepted the change of tone. He paid the check and we went back to the Jeep in the slanting light of late afternoon. We talked lightly, of light things. I was comfortable again, soothed. It had been, after all, I thought, a perfectly wonderful afternoon. On the way home we stopped for groceries. W
hen we were back up in the mountains, just turning off onto Caleb’s road by the mailbox, I said, “Tell me about the earthquakes. I know they’re important to you, but I don’t know how they fit.”
He said nothing, and I looked over at him. His face was closed. He still did not speak, and I said, feeling myself redden again, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No. I’m sorry. I was rude. You’re right; the earthquakes are important. I’ll tell you about them one of these days.”
But he did not speak of them anymore, and I was silent until we reached the fire tower. Some of the shine had gone off the dying day. I realized that I really was tired, terribly so. I wanted only to sleep. Only that.
“Come on up and I’ll see if there are any calls for you,” he said, parking the Jeep. “And I’ll feed you. You don’t want to eat alone on your first night on your own. I make a terrific pasta and mussel thing.”
“Really, T.C., I think I just want to go to bed,” I said, and blushed again, and he grinned. But he did not pick up on it.
“I can’t hold my eyes open,” I added hastily. “It’s been a fast three days.”
“The air up here does it to you,” he said. “Let me just run up and check the machine, and then I’ll drive you on down. Curtis, stay.”
He disappeared from the car and went past the tarp-covered shapes of his mysterious machinery, up the stairs of the tower. I laid my head back against the seat and thought nothing at all. Curtis, asleep on the backseat, groaned in a doggy dream and fell silent again. When T.C. got back into the Jeep I was dozing, too.
At the door of the lodge he stopped, a bag of my groceries in each arm. Twilight was falling fast down here on the ferny earth, but up in the tops of the redwoods day still rode, golden and glorious. The old silence was back.
“I’m sorry about the earthquakes,” he said. “I really was rude. I’m used to sort of guarding all that from people. But you’ll understand about them, I think. Let me take you on a tour of earthquake country tomorrow, and tell you about what I do up here and why I do it, and show you my toys. I haven’t really done that with anybody else. Caleb thinks I’ve got tinker toys or something up there.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Besides, you haven’t finished telling me about you. I want to hear the rest tomorrow.”
I smiled. “You know all there is to know about me now,” I said.
He looked at me for what felt like a long time. His face was attentive and serious; it was a considering look.
“No, I don’t,” he said softly. “I don’t know all about you. I don’t know nearly all about you.”
He shifted one bag into the crook of his left arm with the other one and with the right pulled me toward him and kissed me. He had to bend far down, even with my height. It felt, after Pom’s compactness, strange, exotic, like embracing another species. It was not a passionate kiss, but it was a long one, and soft, and seemed to search my mouth for some essence, find there some truth about me. I felt the long bones of my arms and legs turn to water, and the tears start again in my eyes. But it was not me who finally pulled away. Propped against my leg, Curtis groaned happily.
T.C. put my bags down on the door step and looked owlishly at me over the glasses, which had slipped down his nose.
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, little lady,” he drawled. I watched him wordlessly as he shambled off up the trail, Curtis at his side. At the hairpin bend in the trail he suddenly leaped into the air and clopped his heels together. He looked like a puppet dangling loosely in midair. When he thumped back to earth he did not look back. Curtis barked and gave a desultory prance, and fell to following T.C. sedately again, as if he had never broken stride. Then they were gone around the bend.
I began to laugh helplessly. I took the groceries in, still laughing, and dumped them on the kitchen table, and went into my bedroom and simply fell full-length onto the bed. I did not remember my head hitting the pillow. Deep in the night we had a short fusillade of thunder and lightning, and a hard, straight rain, and it woke me enough to shuck off my clothes and crawl under the covers, and as I did, I began once more to laugh. When I awoke, many hours later, my mouth was as dry and stiff as if I had smiled all night in my sleep.
9
What woke me was a soft scratching noise at the front door. I sensed it more than heard it; all my senses were sharp and open, even before my eyes were. I got up blindly and pulled on the red-and-black checked shirt. It fell to my knees, and made a fairly proper robe. By the time I got to the door my feet were freezing, and I was awake enough to realize that I hoped my caller was T.C.
But it was Curtis who stood there, framed in fog, panting happily and wearing a red bandanna around his neck. I usually hate that when it is done to dogs at home, but up here the bandanna seemed as apt and proper as if a mountain man wore it; a useful object, utilitarian. There was a note rolled and thrust into it.
“Come in, Curtis. Carpe diem,” I said, and he came inside and sat down in front of me and looked up, waiting. I took the note and scratched his ears and he went over and flopped down in front of the cold fireplace. A log fire was laid, and I touched a match to it before I unrolled the note. Curtis sighed in contentment and stretched out full-length before the snapping flames.
“It was the least I could do,” I told him, and read the note.
“I’ll pick you up at nine,” it said. “We’ll be gone most of the day, so bring a warm shirt and a poncho. There’s one hanging behind the kitchen door. Tell Curtis he can stay till I get there. Hope you slept well.”
Instead of a signature he had drawn one of those detestable smiley faces, only this one wore an unmistakable leer. I laughed aloud, a backwash of last night’s glee flooding me.
“There’s absolutely nothing as irresistible as wit,” I told Curtis. “Even if it’s the dumbass kind that puts bandannas on dogs and draws smiley faces. See that you remember that, dog. Stay funny and cute and you’ll have lady dogs falling all over you.”
Curtis thumped his tail without opening his eyes, and I went to dress warmly and get the poncho from behind the kitchen door.
Just past ten we were on the Golden Gate Bridge rattling toward Marin County and Point Reyes, where T.C. wanted to start my earthquake tour. At that time of morning the traffic was light and the fog lay out at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, piled up like whipped cream. Below us the steel-blue water heaved and rolled, and a brisk wind played the bridge like an instrument, making it sway slightly, but palpably. T.C. had unsnapped the plastic side curtains of the Jeep and the wind and cold blue air poured in on us, and I held fast to the bottom of my seat. I had thought the mountains and the red-woods would seem inimical to humans, but somehow it was here, on this consummate iron-red handwork of man, hung between two great and beautiful human habitats, that I felt the animus. I felt light-headed and uneasy, as if, should I let go, the wind would take me and eddy me out and down like a feather into that cold sea, or toss me so high into sunshot nothingness that I would never come back.
“No wonder so many people jump,” I said, shutting my eyes to it for a moment. “It makes you feel like it’s going to get you anyway, so why put it off?”
“I’ve always thought people jump because it’s such a San Francisco kind of thing to do,” T.C. said. “Eccentric and showy and probably very beautiful all the way down. Nothing mundane about it. No dull overdoses. No tacky guns. Laid back, kind of, but effective.”
“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like San Francisco a whole lot?”
“I don’t not like it, exactly,” he said slowly, looking over at the spectacular headlands where Sausalito and, beyond it, Tiburon lay gleaming in the sun like toy villages flung down by a giant’s child. He wore a faded red anorak this morning, mottled with what looked to be bleach spots and ripped on one pocket. The red was wonderful with the dark skin and the beard and hair, I thought; the latter so recently washed that it still had damp comb tracks in it. I even liked the bleach
spots and the tear; anything newer or better cared for would have seemed effete. I liked everything about T. C. Bridgewater this morning. Somehow he seemed to own the bridge and the wind and the vast emptiness as surely and comfortably as he owned the old Jeep. I wished suddenly that he would stop the Jeep in the middle of the bridge and kiss me again. The thought was so clear and shapely and so alien to me that I felt myself redden and hastily sought out things about him to dislike.
He’s as self-absorbed as a child, I thought, and if you put him down anywhere else but those mountains he’d be as clumsy and ludicrous as an aborigine in Paris. I can just see him at the Driving Club.
It didn’t work, of course; I could see him at the Driving Club. After all, he had been more surely born to that world than either Pom or I. And the self-absorption fit him like an animal’s unconscious sense of itself.
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